Top Fitness Expert Reveals Zone 2 Training Secrets

Full Episode Releases September 10th!

Ever wondered why Zone 2 training is the secret weapon for boosting mitochondrial health and not just another buzzword in fitness? Join us as we unlock the science behind exercise intensities and navigate through the five distinct training zones. You'll discover where Zone 2 fits in—just below the first lactate threshold—keeping fat oxidation high and preventing lactate buildup. We break down how heart rate can be used as an indirect measure of these zones and emphasize the importance of understanding individual physiological differences. We also delve into how your fitness level dictates when lactate begins to accumulate, influencing the effectiveness of your workouts.

Maximizing your Zone 2 training can drastically enhance mitochondrial efficiency and build essential physiological systems. We'll reveal why lower-intensity exercise harnesses fat for energy, unlike high-intensity workouts that shift towards carbohydrates. Understand the crossover concept, where your body transitions from burning fat to carbohydrates, and get insights into sex differences in exercise. Premenopausal women, in particular, may have an edge in fat oxidation during sub-maximal exercise. We also explore the mitochondrial capacity in female training, comparing moderately trained females to their male counterparts, and discuss why training status and response are crucial for metabolic health. Don't miss out on this comprehensive guide to mastering Zone 2 training and optimizing your fitness journey.

Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and Relationships


Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 500,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding Exercise Zone Two Training
• 5:56 Maximizing Zone Two Training Benefits
• 10:16 Mitochondrial Capacity in Female Training

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Zone two is something that I feel like, depending on where you listen to, the content from, it's going to shift in the prescription or the understanding of it, or how they define it, like what it is. So what is zone two? And I'm asking this here, like for the listeners, because this has to do a lot with like ideally. I just read something about it this morning. This has to do a lot with like ideally. I just read something about it this morning. And in zone two, like you're, you're mainly trying to do fat. You're mainly trying to keep it at a level in which you're not getting high enough intensity that it's going over to carbohydrate carbohydrate. You're keeping it low enough that you're burning fat. But it's also not necessarily because you're trying to like lean out. It's more so for mitochondrial health and you know a whole slew of things that I'm not smart enough to understand. But can you talk more about zone two, what it is, and does it differ for genders?

Speaker 2: 0:53

Yeah. So when we're thinking about zone two, training I know it's the rage and you guys have heard everything good, bad, left, right up and down, so I'm going to try to make this as like, helpful as possible. So our energy systems that I just talked about also relate to your zones and your intensities and your training. So when you're thinking about your exercise, training and zones, it's going to be on the spectrum of one to five and these are basically, when you break them down, physiologically related to these different physiological points during exercise, and that's how we're classifying them. But most of us aren't going into a lab and doing formal exercise testing and knowing where these things fall. So then we're using heart rate, because heart rate is generally an indirect measure of these things that are happening. So when you're thinking about your zone two, your zone two training, or zone one, which is the zone below that, we have five of them. So right now we're at the first two, zone one and two. That cutoff point at the end of zone two to the start of zone three is typically where you're trying to stay below something known as your first lactate threshold or your first ventilatory threshold. So when you start doing exercise training, your body will start using carbohydrates, start using your energy systems, increasing energy metabolism across the board. You will increase fat oxidation and carbohydrate oxidation simultaneously during this point in time, but fats are still rising with carbs because it's not so intense that it's being cut off yet. So you have blood lactate. People tend to associate lactate with like that made me fatigued, that made me sore, that made me slow down. None of that's true. That's a conversation for another day.

Speaker 2: 2:19

Lactate can be thought of as actually an energy molecule. So when you're breaking down carbohydrates, your body either shuttles those carbs and they're broken up pieces into the next step in the energy system, or it makes lactate. And if you are in an aerobic state where you have lots of oxygen available, you can keep metabolizing it. You'll just take that lactate and keep turning it into energy metabolism and you will keep going. It won't accumulate and it's not making fatigue. So you're always making lactate and clearing it out.

Speaker 2: 2:43

So at this point in time, the cutoff between two and three in your zones is usually your blood lactate is thought to be below two millimoles per liter and that means nothing to anyone if you don't have a lactate meter. It's just the physiological marker of what you're trying to stay below. So that's kind of an indication of exercise fatigue or stress in your body that we can look at. And it's also associated with this increase in ventilation that we have. When your body is starting to become more anaerobic or use more carbohydrate or have less oxygen dependency, you will start breathing heavier because you're going to start producing more CO2 as a byproduct of that energy metabolism going on further down in our mitochondria and our muscles and things in our body. So it's a point at which people often allude to the talk test. Once you can't start sustaining like 15, 20, maybe 30 word conversations calling someone on the phone while you're doing cardio kind of things. That's kind of an indirect association then to that lactate or that heart rate. So a lot of people will say this is about 60 to 70% of your max heart rate or heart rate reserve. Give or take. Roughly. This is not a bad general recommendation.

Speaker 2: 3:47

The thing that when it comes to zones and that lactate that we were talking about, is that your fitness status impacts the point at which you have that increase in lactate and so when we think about then the next zone, we have zone two to zone three and there's that cutoff there and then zone three to zone four. So that cutoff between zone three and zone four is going to be the secondary lactate threshold or the secondary ventilatory threshold, and that's when you start having a lot of rapid breathing, a lot of rapid increase in respiration, and or your blood lactate starts to shoot up from this break point of like four millimoles per liter, and so at this point in time anything above this lactate is typically not being able to clear itself out at a rate to at least somewhat keep up with its production, and you have this rapid increase in blood lactate beyond this point in time. That is kind of your threshold pace or your threshold intensity. And when we are thinking about your own individual physiology, the point at which those lactate thresholds, those two different ones, occur, whether in relation to each other or on their own, or your true lactate threshold, which is that point where it breaks off and starts to increase, is related to your overall aerobic fitness status. So while that's 60 to 70% for generic regular people isn't a bad recommendation, it is also going to be variable, because people who are lower fitness might reach their lactate threshold or that point of that cutoff where they start burning a lot more carbs and less fats at, say, maybe 55 to 65% of their VO2 max, their maximal pace intensity that they could sustain. It's the most amount of oxygen that you can use as your VO2 max, where someone who has a higher training status or fitness status, they might go up to 65 to 75% of their VO2 max. Or, like those elite, elite, crazy marathoners, they might be able to oxidize fat and use oxygen efficiently up to 80 plus percent of their VO2 max. So this is a shifting. So as you get more fit, that heart rate of what you can still be oxidizing fat or being in like a zone two or not producing extra lactate, can shift so that 60 to 70% is a rough guideline For most general people who don't have a lot of cardiovascular fitness and training.

Speaker 2: 5:56

I do sometimes think that is an easy and good recommendation to start with, because generally if you have lower fitness status, you're going to have to exercise at a lower intensity relative to your max anyway and that feels frustrating and hard for most people and we can talk about prescription application and when to ignore that versus use that maybe later. So that's what we're thinking of when we're talking about zone two and so when you are in a zone two state of training, you are typically using a larger percent of fat for fuel production or energy production. And then as you increase to that zone three, to zone four, you essentially have this increase in energy expenditure. Across the board, fat and carbohydrate oxidation increase and then you start increasing in energy expenditure in the moment because you're going harder, faster, whatever, but that fat point starts to rapidly shut down and the percentage of what you're burning becomes more 80, 90, 100% carbohydrate. So this is called the crossover concept, and so the point at which your body kind of starts using a lot of carbs and switches to fat kind of also falls in relation to similar to the lactate threshold, where the more fit you are, the later in that process or exercise or activity you switch from burning a lot of fat or using a lot of fat into carbs. But, as we alluded to already, you don't need to obsess about this from a fat burning standpoint.

Speaker 2: 7:10

This is often when people talk about the fat burning zones that was on treadmills or mapped in your local YMCA 15, 20, 30 years ago. That's what they're talking about, because you're using a higher overall fat concentration as a whole for your energy expenditure relative to the total calories that you're burning, but we don't want to worry about that from that standpoint. Yes, there's benefits to improving cardiovascular fitness from a body composition standpoint and metabolic flexibility or fat burning standpoint, but what you really want to focus on during this type of training is staying in that lower relative effort and intensity, because what you're doing is you're improving your body's capacity to build the physiological systems, whether that's through mitochondrial biogenesis, which is just making more in mitochondria, your mitochondria's ability to use oxygen more efficiently, and or the capillary systems that deliver the oxygen to our muscles so that they can take it up and use it in our muscle cells. That's what we're developing when we are doing that zone two training, and the reason this really works is because it's not that higher intensity training doesn't also help support mitochondrial benefits or any of these things is that you can only do a little bit of that and it does have some extra benefits that we do want to get in both of these. But with zone two training you're able to get in a lot of volume, so you can think of it as the lifting equivalent of like you don't one rep max every single day. You go through phases in training where you do sub-maximal effort work for higher reps or more sets or more volume, to build a quote-unquote base of lifting and then you can refine that with a higher intensity stuff. I think a lot of people with cardio they just think more intense, better, all the time when we really want to think about these classifications and how we're doing it. And so with zone two training you are using a lot of fat and or training your body to use or burn or develop more of a engine to your body or your system. So it's almost like going from like a four to a six cylinder car over time. That's what you're kind of looking to do, right, and so that's what we think about when we're thinking about zone two training.

Speaker 2: 9:04

Now, when it comes to males versus females, at least in the premenopausal state, so when there's still the presence of estrogen in our bodies there are some studies that show. Again it's very mixed but it does suggest that in sub-maximal exercise intensities and states women burn more fat than males during exercise because we're a little bit more likely to use fat for fuel or be type 1 muscle fiber dominant in those states. So we might be using a little bit more fat during those types of exercise because of our physiological predisposition to use fat more during exercise, whereas males are a little bit more predisposed to using carbohydrates. They're a little more type two muscle fiber dominant. And so when we're thinking submaximal, like under 65, 75, maybe 55% of your VO2 max, like lower efforts and intensities, we do see greater fat oxidation rates from females. So when we think about like sex differences between zone two males and women I know there's a lot of confusion around this right now there is this advantage, at least in the premenopausal state, for us being more fat oxidative already, having more type one muscle fibers, maybe potentially needing less volume of that zone two stuff or cardiovascular stuff to get similar adaptation to our male counterparts.

Speaker 2: 10:16

When it comes to like mitochondrial benefits and capacity, maybe a moderately trained female might have similar mitochondrial capacity or components to that of a male. But the one thing I really want to add here too and this is like a little bit of my bias, because this is my dissertation's works thesis answers, questions, solutions. It's like I think that there's also a major component that we ignore about. We look at sex, but we don't look about fitness status too. So it's not that just an untrained female magically is just protected and going to be from all this metabolic health stuff or going to be a magically amazing at zone two training just just because she's a female. Training status and training response in females is still important for increasing that capacity to use and burn fat similar to males or in general. It's just that we naturally have a little bit more of a predisposition to favor that within our metabolism when we're exercising and training.

Speaker 1: 11:08

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